Friday, May 31
6:30/Doors • 7:00 pm
The LaGrua Center
Featured Poet:
Marie Howe
Opening Voice:
Coleman Barks
Music From:
Theodore (Ted) Mook
Admission $30 / Students are free
E-mail: info@theartscafemystic.org
The event will be at La Grua Center
32 Water St, Stonington, CT 06378
We will have chairs and a limited number of tables available.
Masks are optional.
Our featured poet, Marie Howe, almost needs no introduction. For those of you familiar with her work, you already know that this is a rare opportunity to see a poet at the height of her career. You might also know that even though she is widely considered one of the finest poets and teachers of poetry (and faith, and prayer, and asking the right questions) of our time, she is very selective about where and when she shares her poetry. So this is truly an honor for The Arts Café Mystic. We couldn’t have dreamed up a finer poet for this very significant show.
For those of you unfamiliar with Marie’s work, we will be sending you snippets, poems, and links. But here’s more proof: Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry, New and Selected Poems; Magdalene: Poems; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; The Good Thief; and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.
We welcome another very well-known name is the poetry world, Coleman Barks, the renowned translator of the 12th century Sufi Poet Jalal-al-Din Rumi. Anyone who has read or experienced Rumi has probably done so through Coleman’s translations. We are very grateful that he will be joining us in what will more than likely be his final public performance.
We welcome back the extraordinary cellist Theodore (Ted) Mook, who will accompany both poets during their readings. Theodore Mook is a versatile performer, comfortable in avante-garde, classical, historical, and commercial styles. He has been a particularly active proponent of new music since 1980. After almost 30 years in New York City, he now lives in a converted 19th Century Church in rural Rhode Island, where he teaches and hosts a concert series, SwitchArts.